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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2015
Histories of the Jews are a fundamental and polemical aspect of Christian and especially Protestant historiography in the nineteenth century. This article considers, in their context, the five most popular and influential multi-volume histories published in Britain, namely those of Henry Hart Milman, Heinrich Ewald, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Ernest Renan (the one significant – lapsed – Catholic historian in the tradition), and Emil Schürer. It shows how each of these major historians constructs an opposition between Alexandrian Judaism and Palestinian Judaism, a hierarchical opposition which denigrated Alexandrian Judaism as a betrayal or corruption of true religion because it depended on an assimilation of Jewishness and Greekness. The opposition of Greek and Jew was fundamental to nineteenth-century thought for a high intellectual tradition (most famously embodied in Matthew Arnold's categories of Hebraism and Hellenism). The Alexandrian Jews become for these historians an icon of a dangerous hybridity – despite the fact that the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek Bible, was the Bible of early Christianity. The article considers the different strategies adopted by these historians in response to this constructed opposition of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and its continuing implications for the historiography of the Hellenistic world.
1 See e.g. H. Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and his theology (Cambridge, 1973); H. Frei, ‘David Friedrich Strauss’, in N. Smart et al., eds., Nineteenth-century religious thought in the West (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 215–60; T. Larsen, Contested Christianity: the political and social contexts of Victorian theology (Waco, TX, 2004), pp. 43–58; D. Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (San Antonio, TX, 1982), pp. 19–58.
2 Altholz, J., ‘The mind of Victorian orthodoxy: Anglican responses to “Essays and reviews”, 1860–1864’, Church History, 51 (1982), pp. 186–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 J. Secord, Victorian sensation: the extraordinary publication, reception and secret authorship of Vestiges of the natural history of creation (Chicago, IL, 2001).
4 A. P. Stanley, Essays chiefly on questions of church and state, from 1850–1870 (London, 1870), p. 576, originally published in Macmillan's Magazine, 19 (Jan. 1869), pp. 177–87.
5 S. Smiles, A publisher and his friends: memoir and correspondence of the late John Murray, with an account of the origin and progress of the house (2 vols., London, 1891), ii, p. 298.
6 A. Milman, Henry Hart Milman DD: dean of St Paul's: a biographical sketch (London, 1900), p. 86.
7 For the relation between theology and history in Germany, see J. Zachhuber, Theology as science in nineteenth-century Germany: from F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford, 2013).
8 See T. Koditschek, Liberalism, imperialism, and the historical imagination: nineteenth-century visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011); J. Leerssen, National thought in Europe: a cultural history (Amsterdam, 2006); I. Hesketh, The science of history in Victorian Britain: making the past speak (London, 2011); C. Hall, Civilizing subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002); C. Hall, Macaulay and son: architects of imperial Britain (New Haven, CT, 2012).
9 D. Lewis, The origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and evangelical support for a Jewish homeland (Cambridge, 2010).
10 M. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago, IL, 2012).
11 S. Goldhill, Victorian culture and classical antiquity: art, opera, fiction and the proclamation of modernity (Princeton, NJ, 2011), pp. 1–19; F. Turner, The Greek heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1981); C. Stray, Classics transformed: schools, universities and society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, 1998); L. Dowling, Hellenism and homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994); E. Butler, The tyranny of Greece over the German imagination (Cambridge, 1935).
12 Gange, D., ‘Odysseus in Eden: Gladstone's Homer and the idea of a universal epic’, Journal of Victorian Studies, 14 (2009), pp. 190–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. Gange and R. Bryant Davis, ‘Troy’, in D. Gange and M. Ledger Lomas, eds., Cities of God: the Bible and archaeology in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 54–8.
13 Goldhill, Victorian culture, pp. 153–264.
14 A. von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (3 vols., Freiburg, 1886), on which see E. Meijering, Die Hellenisierung des Christentums im Urteil Adolf von Harnacks (Amsterdam, Oxford, and New York, NY, 1985).
15 J. Hall, Ethnic identity in Greek antiquity (Cambridge, 1997); B. Lincoln, Theorizing myth: narrative, ideology and scholarship (Chicago, IL, 1999); and Butler, Tyranny.
16 P. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican high churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994), s.v. Faussett.
17 Milman, Henry Hart Milman, p. 89.
18 Ibid., pp. 84–5.
19 Stanley, Essays, p. 576. This now looks like an exaggeration, which ignores e.g. the reception of Eichorn. On early modern Christian Hebraism, largely ignored by Milman, see A. Grafton, ‘Christian Hebraism and the rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism’, in R. Cohen, N. Dohrmann, and E. Reiner, eds., Jewish culture in early modern Europe: essays in honor of David B. Ruderman (Cincinatti, OH, 2014), pp. 169–80.
20 Niehbuhr's history (1811) is set in context in Goldhill, Victorian culture, pp. 171–6. On Thirlwall, see J. Thirlwall, Connop Thirlwall: historian and theologian (London, 1936).
21 On Wolf, see A. Grafton, G. Most, and J. Zetzel, ‘Introduction’, to F. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer: 1795, ed. A. Grafton, G. Most, and J. Zetzel (Princeton, NJ, 1985); on Strauss, see Harris, David Friedrich Strauss; Frei, ‘David Friedrich Strauss’; Larsen, Contested Christianity, pp. 43–58; Pals, Lives, pp. 19–58.
22 On Maurice, see in particular the excellent J. Morris, F. D. Maurice and the crisis of church authority (Oxford, 2005).
23 [Barrow], ‘Review of Granville's Travels’, Quarterly Review, 39 (1829), pp. 1–41Google Scholar, at p. 8.
24 Turner, Greek heritage, is essential background here. Niebuhr seemed much less frightening after 1830.
25 G. Faussett, Jewish history vindicated from the unscriptural view of it displayed in the history of the Jews (Oxford, 1830), p. 9; T. E., Milman's history of the Jews, published in the family library, examined and refuted on the evidence of the scriptures (London, 1830), p. 67.
26 Faussett, Jewish history, p. 12.
27 Smiles, Publisher, ii, p. 300.
28 Stanley, Essays, p. 576. M. Ledger-Lomas, ‘Conder and sons: dissent and the oriental Bible in nineteenth-century Britain’, in S. Mandelbtote and M. Ledger-Lomas, eds., Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c. 1650–1950 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 205–31, would suggest that this too is something of an exaggeration.
29 R. Taylor, Diegesis: being a discovery of the origins, evidences and early history of Christianity (London, 1834), with the essential background of D. Gange, Dialogues with the dead: Egyptology in British culture and religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford, 2013).
30 Language displayed but distorted in S. Makdisi, Making England Western: occidentalism, race and imperial culture (Chicago, IL, 2014).
31 Milman, Henry Hart Milman, p. 86.
32 See G. Faber, Benjamin Jowett: a portrait with background (2nd edn, London, 1958); P. Hinchliff, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian religion (Oxford, 1987).
33 H. H. Milman, The history of the Jews (2 vols., London, 1909), i, p. 350.
34 See also ibid., pp. 382–4, discussed below.
35 Ibid., pp. 459–66.
36 Ibid., p. 384.
37 Ibid., p. 374.
38 See e.g. Mrs J. Webb, Naomi: or the last days of Jerusalem (London, 1841) – at least twelve editions; Mrs M. Bewsher, Zipporah, the Jewish maiden (London, 1876); G. A. Henty, For the Temple (London, 1888); L. Farmer, The doom of the Holy City (New York, NY, 1895); F. Kingsley, Tor: a streetboy of Jerusalem (Philadelphia, PA, 1905); E. Miller, City of delight: a love drama of the siege and fall of Jerusalem (London, 1908).
39 Goldhill, Victorian culture, pp. 231–42, building on B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English literature and society: racial representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge, 1993); B. Cheyette, ed., Between ‘race’ and culture: representations of ‘the Jew’ in English and American literature (Stanford, CA, 1996); E. Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English culture, 1799–1917 (Oxford, 1998); B. Cheyette and L. Marcus, eds., Modernity, culture and ‘the Jew’ (Oxford, 1998); E. Bar-Yosef and N. Valman, eds., ‘The Jew’ in late Victorian and Edwardian culture: between the East End and East Africa (London, 2009); D. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: social relations and political culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT, 1994).
40 S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the age of empire: religion, race and scholarship (Cambridge, 2009). See also R. Irwin, For lust of knowing: the Orientalists and their enemies (London, 2006); M. Olender, The language of paradise: race, religion and philology in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Lincoln, Theorizing myth; T. Todorov, On human diversity: nationalism, racism and exoticism in French thought, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, 1993).
41 T. W. Davies, Heinrich Ewald, orientalist and theologian, 1803–1903: a centenary appreciation (London, 1903), p. 38.
42 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
43 Ibid., p. 92.
44 S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, IL, 1998), p. 194. Ewald was replaced by Schürer, at least for academics (see below pp. 23–4).
45 H. Ewald, The history of Israel, trans. R. Martineau, J. Carpenter, and J. Smith (8 vols., London, 1867), i, pp. 2–3.
46 Ibid., p. 4.
47 Ibid., p. 10.
48 Ibid., p. 4.
49 Ibid., p. 10.
50 See, on a much discussed topic, S. Berger, The search for normality: national identity and historical consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Oxford, 1997); H. Grebing, Der ‘deutsche Sonderweg’ in Europa, 1806–1945: eine Kritik (Stuttgart, 1986).
51 Ewald, History, i, pp. 88–92.
52 Ibid., v, p. 240.
53 Ibid., p. 246.
54 Ibid., p. 359.
55 Ibid., pp. 361, 360.
56 Davies, Ewald, pp. 87–8. Contrast Droysen, for whom, as Momigliano, A., ‘J. C. Droysen between Greeks and Jews’, History and Theory, 9 (1970), pp. 139–53Google Scholar, at p. 144, drolly writes, ‘The history of Hellenism was a “praeparatio evangelica” to the history of Prussia.’
57 As brilliantly demonstrated in Turner, Greek heritage.
58 The following is based on Heschel, Geiger, pp. 192–6.
59 Ewald, , ‘Übersicht der 1857–1858 erscheinen Schriften zur Bilbischen Wissenschaft’, Jahrbücher der biblischen Wissenschaft, 9 (1858), p. 103Google Scholar.
60 An anonymous review of Ewald, in Protestantische Kirchenzeitung für das evangelische Deutschland, 2 (1855), pp. 835–9, cited by Heschel, Geiger, p. 284 n. 16.
61 Ewald, ‘Übersicht der 1857–1858 erscheinen Schriften zur Bilbischen Wissenschaft’, p. 103.
62 Geiger, A., ‘Review of Ewald, vol. 7 of Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus’, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, 7 (1869), p. 196Google Scholar.
63 H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus (3rd edn, 7 vols., Göttingen, 1864), v, p. 477 n. 1.
64 A. P. Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, in connection with their history (London, 1856); idem, Sermons in the East, preached before the prince of Wales (London, 1863), contextualized and discussed in S. Goldhill, The buried life of things: how objects make history in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 3.
65 See Stanley, Essays, for retrospectives; A. P. Stanley, A letter to the lord bishop of London on the state of subscription in the Church of England and in the University of Oxford (Oxford and London, 1863), with the criticism of one-time Tractarian J. Mozley, Subscription to the articles: a letter to the Rev. Professor Stanley (Oxford and London, 1863).
66 The now standard biography of Stanley is J. Witheridge, The excellent Dr Stanley: the life of Dean Stanley of Westminster (Norwich, 2013). R. Prothero, The life and correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (2 vols., London, 1893), and R. Prothero, ed., Letters and verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D. D. (London, 1895), are indispensable, however, and obviously surpass G. Bradley, Recollections of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (London, 1883); G. Oliver, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley: his life, work and teaching (London, 1885). See also A. Baillie and H. Bolitho, eds., Letters of Lady Augusta Stanley: a young lady at court, 1849–1863 (London, 1927); idem and idem, eds., Later letters of Lady Augusta Stanley, 1864–1876 (London, 1929); idem and idem, eds., A Victorian dean: a memoir of Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster (London, 1930).
67 [Anon.], Canon Stanley's ‘Lectures on the history of the Jewish church’ reviewed and their true character exposed (London, 1863), p. 69. See also [Anon.], A review of the third series of Dean Stanley's lectures on the Jewish church (London, 1877); S. Malan, Philosophy or truth? Remarks on the first five lectures by the dean of Westminster on the Jewish church (London, 1865).
68 E. Renan, History of the people of Israel, iv:From the rule of the Persians to that of the Greeks (Boston, MA, 1896), p. 197.
69 A point not lost on his virulent evangelical critics: see [Anon.], Canon Stanley, p. 10: ‘Not that we charge all this invention to the imagination of Professor Stanley. The famous Ewald is responsible for the greatest part’; [Anon.], A review, p. 20: ‘the most extreme German criticism’; and Malan, Philosophy or truth?. In May 1860, Stanley sent Ewald a copy of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, to which Stanley had contributed several articles, explaining it was designed to spread Ewald's ideas to a British public; see M. Ledger-Lomas, ‘Introduction’, to William Smith's dictionary of the Bible (London, 2015).
70 H. Grätz, History of the Jews, trans. B. Löwy (Philadelphia, PA, 1891 (1853)), i, pp. 512–15; see M. Meyer, Judaism within modernity: essays on Jewish history and religion (Detroit, MI, 2001), pp. 64–75; M. Mack, German liberalism and the Jew: the inner anti-Semitism of philosophy and German Jewish responses (Chicago, IL, 2003), pp. 98–107; M. Stoetzler, The state, the nation and the Jews: liberalism and the anti-Semitism dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln, NE, 2008); and, more generally, R. Clements, ‘Heinrich Graetz as biblical historian and religious apologist’, in J. Emerton and S. Reif, eds., Interpreting the Hebrew Bible: essays in honour of E. I. J. Rosenthal (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 35–59.
71 Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley, p. 263.
72 Arnold, M., ‘Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish church’, Macmillan's Magazine, 7 (1863), pp. 327–36Google Scholar, at p. 330. This is an important and much-discussed review in which Arnold begins to work out his ideas on elite cultural figures: see D. de Laura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian Britain: Newman, Arnold and Pater (Austin, TX, 1969); Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, pp. 105–38.
73 F. D. Maurice in a letter to the Spectator, 7 Feb. 1863, p. 12 – responding to Arnold.
74 A. P. Stanley, Lectures on the history of the Jewish church, iii (London, 1876), p. 232.
75 Ibid., p. 243.
76 Ibid., p. 248.
77 C. Kingsley, Hypatia: or New foes with an old face (London, 1904), p. xiv, first published 1853. See also C. Kingsley, Alexandria and her schools (Cambridge, 1854).
78 Stanley Lectures, iii, p. 252.
79 Ibid., p. 173.
80 Ibid., p. 174.
81 For Bauer in context, see Zachhuber, Theology.
82 Stanley, Lectures, iii, p. 172. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, pp. 127–8, notes that Arnold called Socrates ‘terribly at ease in Zion’, an idea he attributed to Carlyle, but which would also need Stanley and Grote as forebears.
83 Turner, Greek heritage.
84 E. Abbott, Hellenica: a collection of essays on Greek poetry, philosophy, history and religion (London, 1880), p. 38.
85 H. Highton, Dean Stanley and Saint Socrates: the ethics of the philosopher and the philosophy of the divine (London, 1873), p. 18 – from a rather too shrill evangelical perspective – was alone in pointing out the ludicrous gaps in Stanley's argument, by recalling Socrates's eroticism, his advice to a courtesan, and his encouragement of heavy drinking.
86 Renan, History, p. 181. On Renan, see Pals, Lives; Priest, R., ‘Reading, writing and religion in nineteenth-century France: the popular reception of Renan's Life of Jesus’, Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014), pp. 258–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Gospel according to Renan: reading, writing and religion in nineteenth-century France (Oxford, 2015).
87 Renan, History, p. 173.
88 Ibid., p. 181.
89 Ibid., p. 225.
90 Ibid., pp. 190, 191.
91 Ibid., pp. 211, 218.
92 Ibid., pp. 201, 202. On the history of the Septuagint's reception, see N. de Lange ‘The Septuagint as a Jewish classic’, in S. Humphreys and R. Wagner, eds., Modernity's classics (Berlin, 2013), pp. 143–63; T. Rajak, Translation and survival: the Greek Bible of the ancient Jewish diaspora (Oxford, 2009). The importance of the Septuagint was asserted both by E. Schürer, A history of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus Christ, trans. S. Taylor and P. Christie (6 vols., Edinburgh, 1885), and earlier by E. W. Grinfield, An apology for the Septuagint (London, 1850). For the seminal contribution of Scaliger to the understanding of the Septuagint and Hellenistic Judaism, see Grafton, ‘Christian Hebraism’, though it seems that Scaliger did not play a major role in the imagination of the scholars of Judaism I am discussing, despite and except Bernays.
93 Renan, History, p. 202. This idea was already in F. C. Baur in germ.
94 Ibid., History, p. 225.
95 De Lange, ‘Septuagint’.
96 Renan, History, p. 301.
97 Schürer, History, iv, p. 281.
98 Ibid., v, pp. 1–2, his emphases.
99 Momigliano, ‘Droysen’, pp. 142–3.
100 J. Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus, ii:Geschichte der Bildung des Hellenistischen Staatensystemes (Hamburg, 1843), p. 584; Momigliano, ‘Droysen’, p. 147.
101 M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: studies in their encounter in Palestine during the early Hellenistic period, trans. J. Bowden (2 vols., London, 1974), i, p. 104. Compare V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia, PA, 1959), who still ‘tends to see [Hellenistic Jewish culture and literature] as a betrayal, one that affected the very basis of national life’, de Lange ‘Septuagint’, p. 156.
102 S. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia, PA, 1987), p. 40; E. Bickerman, Four strange books of the Bible: Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth, Esther (New York, NY, 1967); idem, From Ezra to the last of the Maccabees: foundations of post-biblical Judaism (New York, NY, 1970); and most importantly idem, The Jews in the Greek age (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
103 S. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish society, 200 bce to 640 ce (Princeton, NJ, 2001); also idem, Were the Jews a Mediterranean society? Reciprocity and solidarity in ancient Judaism (Princeton, NJ, 2009).
104 T. Engberg-Pedersen, Paul in his Hellenistic context (London and New York, NY, 1994), p. 30.
105 L. Grabbe, History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple period, ii:The coming of the Greeks: the early Hellenistic period (London, 2008), p. 126.
106 E. Schürer, The history of the Jewish people in the age of Jesus Christ, 175 bc–ad 135, rev. and ed. G. Vermès, F. Millar, and M. Goodman (3 vols. in 4, Edinburgh, 1973–87), i, preface. For an account of the editing, see G. Vermès Jesus in the Jewish world (London, 2010), pp. 119–29.
107 Along with Hengel and Cohen, one must add Bickerman, Jews in the Greek age; J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish identity in the Hellenistic diaspora (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000); Schwartz, Imperialism; idem, Were the Jews a Mediterranean society?; and, pre-Hengel, Tcherikover, Hellenistic civilization. Momigliano, ‘Droysen’, and, differently, E. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: the reinvention of Jewish tradition (Berkeley, CA, 1998), are important exceptions.
